This chapter centers on Bieral’s role in the 1854 Anthony Burns fugitive slave case, where he organized armed guards to prevent Burns’s rescue. Bieral’s participation reveals his alignment with pro-slavery Democrats and his complex racial identity. The chapter interrogates his motivations – political loyalty, racial self-interest, and personal pride – while contrasting his actions with abolitionist efforts. Bieral’s subsequent assault on attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr., exemplifies the violent enforcement of political power. The narrative situates Bieral within the broader context of antebellum racial politics, highlighting the paradox of a possibly mixed-race man defending slavery to assert his whiteness and authority.

The introduction justifies telling the story of the forgotten bully Louis Bieral. His life was extraordinary not only because of his interactions with famous people, but also because of his wide range of adventures. Moreover, his brutal career helps us understand the importance of private, nonlethal violence to the operation of nineteenth-century America.

The Educating for American Democracy report (2021) proposes a national- consensus approach to civics and history education for K-12 public schools, emphasizing civic knowledge and civic virtues as the priority, and the necessary foundations for constructive and responsible civic participation. It then has three sections: (a) Tocqueville, Common Schools, and the Invention of American Civics – including discussion of Horace Mann, and Henry Randall Waite and the American Institute of Civics; (b) Educating for American Democracy: Civic Knowledge and Civic Virtues – summarizing the seven Themes of the report and its Roadmap of curricular guidance (ranging from Civic Participation and We the People to A New Constitution and A People in the World); and (c) American Exemplars of Reflective Patriotism and Civic Honesty – with subsections on Abolitionism and the Constitutional Confidence of Douglass and Lincoln; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and American Justice for Women; and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Persistent Hope in American Justice.

Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. As new generations return to his texts, the palimpsest of conflicting ideas about his Blackness or lack thereof keeps changing. The chapter examines some of these layers by focusing on the paradox of enslaved authorship – of a writer who built his authority on the basis of his deauthorization. Poems, the chapter shows, were Manzano’s most elaborate literary form of back talk, as they allowed him to evade the abolitionist pressure to write about slavery.

Chapter 2 examines abolitionist texts that engaged the conventions of the theatrical genre of farce to denounce the illegal slave trade. By analyzing how captives and abolitionists mocked the generalized awareness of pretense that helped slavery flourish under prohibitions, it foregrounds the role that farce played in processes of racialization. Henry Shirley, a kidnapped man who requested help from British authorities, pointed out that a large range of people were complicit in the illegal slave trade, thereby making the rule of law look like a farce. The chapter concludes by tracing how captives turned the logic of pretense to their advantage, using forged documents or new names in the cities of Havana and Santiago. Enslaved people, it shows, could sometimes partake in the benefits of pretense by assuming new names and passing as free.

Chapter 4 shows how novels engaged with narratives of racial coherence as Cuban slavery came to an end. Because of their ability to construct clashing voices, bring them into a tense truce via free indirect discourse, and engage the reader’s own knowing and refusal to know, novels were uniquely poised to stage racial passing. The chapter puts the first novel published by a Cuban of African descent, Martín Morúa Delgado’s Sofía (1892), in dialogue with two others: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882) and Ramón Meza’s Carmela (1887). As Sofía shows, white identities were secured through hypocrisy and cynicism – an open secret that Villaverde and Meza had not fully acknowledged. In this way, the chapter traces the conditions of possibility for passing-as-open-secret. While in the United States passing is generally understood as a divergence between the private and public identities of a given subject – the public one being perceived as a deception that serves to hide the private one – these novels delved into situations in which this divergence was willfully ignored, and in which white identity was not invalidated by the perception of fraud.

This chapter considers the place of democracy in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By conceptualizing democracy, in pragmatist fashion, as a “way of life,” Emerson can be shown to have engaged democracy throughout his career in several different dimensions, both within and beyond official, state, or legal power relations. While Emerson participated in a discourse that was skeptical of the social dynamics of democracy in mass society, he simultaneously upheld his commitment to a philosophy of history that recognized in what he called “the democratic element” a driving force toward greater justice and equality. Democracy furthermore provided the key through which Emerson interpreted his own practice and poetics as a freelance lecturer. Emerson’s commitment to a transcendentally conceived notion of justice at times came into conflict with democracy’s requirements of negotiation and compromise, particularly in the context of radical abolitionism and the Civil War. As this chapter argues, Emerson tirelessly strove to resolve this conflict.

This chapter claims that Emerson’s consideration of slavery occurs in terms that are by definition contradictory, as he both emphasizes and tries to reconcile a series of oppositions within transcendentalist principles. These oppositions include conflicts between self-reliance and social reform; between labor as a means of self-development and of economic development; between absolute moral law and temporal statute law; between teleological history and evolutionary history; and, finally, between the refusal of violence and the use of violence as a political expedient. The chapter examines the complexities of Emerson’s formulations of these transcendentalist oppositions, showing how his commentaries on slavery can play out in counterintuitive ways, such that Emerson’s idiosyncratic version of antislavery “free labor” ideology supports his expressed resistance to a career as an abolitionist, his argument that slavery contravenes a “higher” law than statute law equivocally denounces slavery, and his defense of abolitionist violence transforms physical force into moral force.

For over four decades, the District of Columbia, the seat of national government and a major slave-trading depot, stood as a key symbol and site of the US government’s support of slavery. This chapter focuses on abolitionist depictions of the slave trade in the District and the moral liability thrust on northern citizens because of its many kinds of publicness. Abolitionists repeatedly circulated the image of chained slaves driven past the US Capitol. Reprised by sightseers and abolitionists, the iconic image conjured not only democratic complicity but also democratic shame. William Wells Brown searingly critiqued the District slave trade in Original Panoramic Views of the Life of an American Slave (1849), the focus of the chapter’s final section.

The District of Columbia, a federal district overseen by Congress, was a constitutional battleground where freedom nationalists, proslavery firebrands, and supporters of sectional harmony clashed over federal responsibility for slavery. From 1838 to 1859, US Representative Joshua Giddings (Ohio) insisted that the federal government had no constitutional authority to uphold slavery there. His signature claim was that the framers had granted northern states the right not to be made complicit in slavery through any action or policy of the federal government, beyond the Constitution’s requirements. Giddings railed against the persistent battering of this political and moral quarantine. The sensational attempt by over seventy-five enslaved Black residents to flee the nation’s capital in 1848 onboard the Pearl brought unprecedented attention to Giddings’ defense of northern purity rights. This chapter examines Giddings’ notion of a northern right to political innocence and its role in his congressional brawls over slavery in the District of Columbia.

Abraham Lincoln began his political life as an adherent of henry clay's Whig party, which was formed in the 1830s in opposition to the democratic party, whose chief figurehead at that time was Andrew Jackson. As a Whig, Lincoln Promoted the public funding of "Internal improvements," a national bank (to create a uniform medium of commercial exchange) and tariffs to protect American production from foreign competition. He condemned what he considered the lawlessness of the democrats, and occasionally condemned slavery as well.

The term “race” was widely used in the 1500s to describe many types of blood relationships but gradually became focused on ethnicity and skin colour. The elevation of Anglo-Saxons as a superior race developed alongside “scientific racism” in the 1800s, and in turn gave an impetus to eugenics and Aryianism. By 1900, the language of race was found everywhere in England, and it declined very slowly throughout the subsequent century.

Between the 1770s and the 1840s, British abolitionism moved from anti-capitalist utilitarianism to free trade. In this process, the identification of the “real slave” was crucial: Not only slave owners, but also some trade unions and workers’ associations considered the wage earner to be the real slave. This process also responded to the development of French abolitionism, which was mostly top-down and less concerned with ethics than with economic and social considerations. The profitability of slavery and the survival of the poor on the continent were constantly intertwined and helped to explain Napoleon’s restoration of slavery and the uncertainties of the 1848 revolution regarding the fate of former slaves.

How did the abolition of slavery in the United States affect the fate of labor in the three empires examined here? It will be argued that the abolition of slavery in the United States led to a fundamental change in global capitalism. This change occurred not only in the terms already examined by Beckert (new supplies of cotton and forced labor around the world), but also in a new relationship between capitalism, labor and the state. It will be argued that the Second Industrial Revolution and the Great Transformation, as Polanyi called it, were the main outcomes of this process, although most historiographies of these topics have never linked these dynamics to the American Civil War.

In this chapter we examine the connection between religion and abolition. After discussing early antislavery voices, such as the Essenes and St. Gregory of Nyssa, we recount in detail the growing Christian rejection of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Attention is given to the arguments and action of early Quaker abolitionists, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, to Anglicans like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, and to antislavery activism in North America leading up to the American Civil War. We then provide a theoretical evaluation of the role of Christianity in the nineteenth-century rejection of slavery. The chapter closes with an exposition of Islamic abolitionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Ahmad Bey, Rashid Rida, Mohsen Kadivar, and Bernard Freamon.

This chapter traces the experiences of Sarah Osborne Benjamin, who married a soldier in the Third New York Regiment and traveled with him from West Point to Philadelphia and Yorktown. Although she never learned to write, she left behind a rich oral autobiography: her application for a Revolutionary War pension. In it, she recalls her work as a washerwoman and cook, her relationships with other Continental Army women, and her postwar financial challenges. She offers a nuanced picture of the Continental Army as a place of oppressive surveillance but also complex social networking and protest. By exploring her interpretation of the American Revolution, I argue that, even as Continental Army women confronted bodily scrutiny and restrictive military regulations, they also derived power from their relationships. After the war, they used oral testimony, material culture, and strategic storytelling to exercise a distinctive form of archival agency.

This chapter explores the significance of race for the landscape of genius in relation to the overall racial construction of nature in American society. It focuses on Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill in Ancostia, overlooking Washington DC. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator and as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity.

This essay addresses the role of whiteness in slave narratives, a body of writing that featured the voices and experiences of African Americans, arguing that white American culture is fundamental to these narratives. This foundational presence is clear in the narratives’ representation of white slave owners, in the prefaces or other material added to slave narratives by white writers, and in the fact that some narratives were wholly written by white writers, representing the experience of formerly enslaved African Americans. But it is important to understand that white American culture made the slave narratives necessary and that these narratives work to persuade white Americans of moral imperatives for which African Americans needed no persuasion.